rif

According to Insight Korea, South Korea's digital bank K Bank has established a strategic partnership with blockchain company Ripple to advance the verification of next-generation cross-border remittance technology based on blockchain.Both parties will focus on assessing the optimization potential in remittance speed, cost structure, and transaction transparency through Ripple's global payment network and infrastructure. The current collaboration includes proof of concept based on digital wallets, joint development of cross-border remittance models, and expansion in the digital asset field. The ongoing second phase of testing has simulated the connection between the bank's internal systems and customer accounts, testing on-chain fund transfers aimed at the UAE and Thailand. K Bank is also evaluating the adoption of Ripple's SaaS digital wallet Palisade to enhance compliance and deployment efficiency.

Minh Don, the product lead of Drift, stated on its official Discord that it will take a few weeks to optimize the codebase, remove and add some small but impactful features, and plans to relaunch its forked exchange in May or June this year.Previously, Drift Protocol suffered losses exceeding $285 million in an attack incident.

The DeFi Education Fund, along with Aave Labs, Uniswap Labs, Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz, and other organizations, has sent a letter to the U.S. SEC in response to the recent statement released by the trading and markets division regarding the registration of "non-custodial user interface" brokers for crypto asset securities.The signatories support the statement that the "non-custodial user interface," which only provides a technical entry point and allows users to manage their assets independently, should be excluded from broker registration. They also urge the SEC to establish clearer and more sustainable definitions of "broker" through formal rulemaking, to avoid incorrectly categorizing neutral software tool providers, validators, RPC/API, oracles, cloud services, and other infrastructure under broker regulations. This would provide long-term legal certainty for blockchain infrastructure innovation while ensuring investor protection.Previously, the SEC's trading and markets division indicated that some DeFi trading interfaces do not need to register as brokers, allowing for policy space for related applications. Supporters believe that the new regulations could cover infrastructure participants such as validators, APIs, and oracles. Currently, the U.S. crypto market legislation, the CLARITY Act, is stalled in the Senate.

Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, stating that there is a significant risk associated with a single data source in light of the recent incident where weather sensors at Paris airport were interfered with, affecting the outcomes of prediction markets.He pointed out that for such data-driven prediction markets, at least the median of three independent data sources should be used as a reference to reduce the possibility of manipulation.

ChainCatcher reports live from the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, where Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech. He defined Ethereum by two core functions: first, as a public bulletin board for applications to publish messages and data; second, as shared digital objects controlled by code, encompassing assets, NFTs, ENS, and DAOs. He emphasized that Ethereum's goal is not to compete with high-frequency trading platforms on speed, but to become the most secure, decentralized, and always-online trusted chain.Regarding the short-term roadmap, he introduced the account abstraction proposal EIP-8141, which natively supports smart contract wallets, quantum-resistant signature algorithms, and privacy protocols; in terms of quantum resistance, there are currently two signature schemes based on hash and lattice, and the team is significantly enhancing their efficiency through EVM vectorization.He revealed that ZKVM is fast enough to prove real-time EVM execution, with this year's goal being to ensure its security, planning to start deployment from a small proportion of the network, aiming to become the primary method of validation by 2028, allowing Ethereum to scale significantly without sacrificing decentralization. In terms of long-term vision, Ethereum is actively utilizing AI to generate mathematical proofs to formalize software security verification, pursuing complete quantum safety and maximum simplicity to ensure platform security does not rely on the continuous existence of any single team.

At the "Crypto 2026: From Cryptocurrency to Smart Economy" themed forum held in Hong Kong, guests including KiteAI's Asia Pacific head Laughing, Sentient's Asia Pacific head Anita, Brevis content director Nic Tang, Mentis product head Jerry, and Predict.fun's Asia Pacific BD head Ah Huang Ricardo engaged in a roundtable discussion on the theme "AI × Crypto --- The Foundation of the Next Generation Digital Economy."Regarding whether the outbreak of open-source AI Agents (such as "raising lobsters") is a short-term sentiment or a long-term trend, Laughing believes this marks a paradigm shift of AI from "conversational" to "executive," signaling the beginning of a long-term trend. However, Agents lack a physical identity, making it difficult for merchants to trust their trading behavior, and issues of data leakage and uncontrollability remain obstacles that must be overcome for scaling. Jerry pointed out, based on his own usage experience, that current Agents face security risks such as memory fuzziness, token consumption in dead loops, and accidental file deletion. Although newly emerged Agents have improvements, they still have shortcomings. Ah Huang Ricardo stated that behind the short-term sentiment is real user demand, but truly reproducible profitable trading Agents are still very rare, and there is a long way to go.Addressing core bottlenecks such as trust, security, and verifiability, Nic Tang emphasized that the current execution process of Agents is like a black box, where users cannot verify whether their decisions are executed as promised. Zero-knowledge proof technology can mathematically prove the source of an Agent's output and compliance with behavior, while not exposing privacy. Anita added that Sentient is committed to building an open and collaborative AI agent network, promoting the deep integration of AI and blockchain in identity, data, and incentive layers, providing foundational support for the next generation digital economy.Regarding the application scenarios that are likely to scale first, the guests generally believe that the programming field is relatively mature, and Agents in prediction markets perform better than humans in specific tracks due to their rationality and lack of emotions. In the short term, they are optimistic about API Marketplace and cross-platform consumer shopping Agents, while in the medium term, they are optimistic about content creation AI (such as AI influencers). Agent-to-Agent interaction and the Agent/Skill Marketplace are seen as important future trends.

According to Jinshi reports, Federal Reserve Governor Waller stated that the low hiring and low layoffs in the job market are partly related to how companies are responding to tariffs.

According to Cointelegraph, since the $280 million attack on Drift Protocol on April 1, at least 12 DeFi protocols and cryptocurrency companies have been attacked in just over two weeks.Since early April, attacks on crypto protocols or companies include CoW Swap, Hyperbridge, Bybit, Dango, Silo Finance, BSC TMM, Aethir, MONA, Zerion, and the recent Rhea Finance and Grinex exchanges.Among them, the DeFi protocol Rhea Finance reported that the attackers "exploited a vulnerability in Rhea's margin trading feature to execute a coordinated liquidity pool manipulation attack," affecting the Rhea Lend smart contract. According to blockchain security company CertiK, the stolen funds amount to approximately $7.6 million.

According to Cointelegraph, stablecoin issuer Circle is facing a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts for failing to freeze the stolen funds from the Drift Protocol during the attack incident.The plaintiffs claim that the attacker transferred approximately $230 million USDC from Solana to Ethereum within hours using Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), and Circle did not intervene. The lawsuit accuses Circle of complicity and incitement to misappropriation and negligence. Crypto analytics firm Elliptic previously suspected that the attack may be related to North Korean-backed hackers, and the related funds were subsequently exchanged for ETH and transferred via Tornado Cash.

According to Cointelegraph, Michael Selig, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), stated that the agency is working to provide clarity for the crypto space, including tokenized collateral and stablecoins, while also developing clear guidelines for prediction markets.

Drift announced on its official website that the Drift Protocol has received support from Tether and other partners, with Tether planning to invest $127.5 million and other partners planning to invest $20 million to jointly support user recovery.The support plan includes a $100 million revenue-linked credit line, ecosystem grants, and loans provided to market makers. Drift will establish a dedicated user recovery pool aimed at gradually addressing the $295 million in unpaid user losses as trading revenue grows. Additionally, Drift will issue independent recovery tokens to affected users, which represent a claim on the recovery pool and are transferable. Drift is currently working on the protocol restart, having hired Ottersec and Asymmetric for auditing, and will migrate the settlement layer from USDC to USDT. The previous attack resulted in approximately $295 million worth of assets being stolen, while the insurance fund assets were unaffected.

According to Jinshi reports, Federal Reserve's Musalem stated that the weakening impact of tariffs will help inflation decline, and housing inflation is also moving in the right direction.

Farcaster posted, "There will be no token issuance. The 'token discussion' circulating in the market is actually related to Hypersnap, which is a fork project of the Farcaster protocol. The Hypersnap team refers to its token as the 'Farcaster token' in discussions, which has led to confusion among users who are not familiar with the technical details.It is important to clarify that this is not a comment on the fork project itself. We just want to avoid this kind of speculation that continues to create unnecessary noise, such as bot accounts, airdrop users, and scam accounts, all of which can affect the overall network experience. It should be made clear that there is no so-called Farcaster protocol token airdrop."

According to Jin Shi reports, U.S. Treasury Secretary Besant stated that Trump's tariff levels may return to the levels before the Supreme Court abolished multiple imposition orders by early July. Besant mentioned that, although it is difficult to predict when the consequences of the war in Iraq will affect the U.S. economy, the current economic situation remains strong, with an expected growth rate exceeding 3% or even 3.5% this year. He also pointed out that the continued decline in core inflation is a good sign and stated that the Federal Reserve has consistently misjudged the inflation issue.

The blockchain interoperability protocol Hyperbridge disclosed details of the previous DOT attack incident, resulting in a loss of approximately $237,000. The root of the vulnerability lies in the HandlerV1 contract's VerifyProof() function, which lacks input validation and does not verify the leaf_index leafCount, allowing attackers to forge Merkle proofs.Using this, the attacker gained administrator privileges for the DOT token bridging contract on Ethereum, subsequently minting 1 billion bridged DOT (which is about 2800 times the legitimate circulation of approximately 356,000) and cashing out on decentralized exchanges. Hyperbridge stated that it is currently working with security partners to trace the funds, and cross-chain functionality will remain suspended until the investigation is completed.

According to The Block, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire stated that Circle will not freeze USDC wallets unrelated to legal proceedings.At a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Allaire responded to ongoing online criticism regarding whether the company should freeze USDC funds in light of hacking and vulnerability incidents. The controversy became more pronounced earlier this month when the decentralized finance protocol Drift suffered an attack of approximately $280 million, which is believed to be related to a six-month-long attack carried out through complex social engineering techniques, possibly involving a North Korean-affiliated hacking group.Prominent on-chain analysts, including on-chain investigator ZachXBT, publicly criticized Circle for not freezing approximately $230 million in USDC funds. These funds were reportedly transferred from Solana to Ethereum via Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol.

Circle Chief Strategy Officer Dante Disparte published a response regarding the over $270 million theft incident involving Drift Protocol. Disparte stated that Circle only freezes USDC when legally mandated to do so, and this is not a unilateral decision, nor is it a backdoor or algorithmic monitoring. This reflects the rule of law in internet-native financial activities.He pointed out that the core issue facing open systems is that the legal framework's response speed lags behind technological development. Protocols, wallets, exchanges, and stablecoin issuers should regard security and accountability as a shared obligation, and DeFi protocols can develop on-chain technical protection measures by referencing the circuit breaker mechanisms of traditional markets.He also called for the legislative processes of the U.S. GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act to incorporate due process, property rights, and financial privacy protection standards into law before the next major security incident occurs.

The American law firm Gibbs Mura has officially announced a collective lawsuit investigation regarding the Drift Protocol theft incident, involving a fund scale of approximately $280 million to $285 million. It is reported that over $230 million USDC was transferred to Ethereum via Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP).Gibbs Mura believes that although Circle has the technical capability to freeze funds, it did not take freezing action during this attack. The law firm is currently assessing whether investors can file claims against Circle for "failure to intervene in a timely manner," "insufficient monitoring," and "failure to fulfill stablecoin responsibilities," and is calling on affected users to participate in the lawsuit to advance fund recovery.

The Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) released guidelines for the issuance of virtual assets on Thursday, providing clear regulations on the structural design, information disclosure, and distribution methods for stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokens.The guidelines categorize token issuance into three pathways: Category 1 covers fiat-pegged and asset-pegged virtual assets; Category 2 must be distributed through licensed intermediaries, which are responsible for due diligence and ongoing compliance verification; the third category consists of functionally restricted exempt virtual assets.VARA's General Counsel Ruben Bombardi stated that the framework enhances transparency through white papers and independent risk disclosure statements, providing issuers with "greater regulatory certainty" and offering market participants a "single, exclusive reference." These guidelines serve as an interpretative document for the existing "Virtual Asset Issuance Rules Manual" and do not constitute new legislation.